Here’s the latest development. Google partnered with Honor, to bring an image-to-video AI feature to their new Honor 400 series phones. According to a report from The Verge, buyers of these phones, launching around May 22nd, 2025, will be the first to experiment with this specific tool.

This capability arrives even before it’s widely available through Google’s main services like Gemini. This isn’t an abstract concept; it’s a feature built right into the phone’s Gallery app for easy digital content creation.

You pick a picture, tap a button, and wait about a minute or two. The result is a short, five-second video clip where the AI attempts to animate your original static image. This demonstrates a practical application of video synthesis.

It sounds straightforward, maybe too simple for some users expecting more control. There’s no option to add text to guide the AI, like telling it to make a specific action happen. You provide the image and see what the machine learning video algorithm produces, making it an interesting example of generative video with minimal input.

This basic function makes it very easy to use. However, the lack of user direction means the results can be quite unpredictable, ranging from impressive to nonsensical.

Meet Veo 2: The Brains Behind the Animation

The technology driving this feature is Google’s Veo 2 model. Google announced Veo as their advanced AI video generation solution, competing with models like OpenAI’s Sora. Veo 2 is built to create more realistic and consistent video clips from various inputs, including text, images, or even other videos.

While the Honor phone feature focuses specifically on image-to-video AI, Veo 2 itself has broader capabilities. Google demonstrated its power to understand cinematic terms like “timelapse” or “aerial shot” from text prompts, moving into text-to-video AI. It also aims for better consistency, meaning people and objects should maintain their appearance across different shots, a frequent challenge in earlier AI video tools.

Google also highlighted Veo 2’s capacity to produce longer clips (over a minute was shown in demos) at high definition. The five-second constraint on the Honor feature might be a practical choice for speed on mobile devices or quick cloud processing. Yet, the underlying model seems prepared for more demanding tasks, suggesting the phone app offers just a glimpse of the full Google AI video generator potential.

How Does it Actually Perform? Hits and Misses

Okay, so it can turn pictures into videos. But how well does it work? Based on early reports, the performance varies, which is common for leading-edge AI right now.

Simple subjects appear to yield the best results. A clear photo of a person or a pet might generate a fairly believable short motion sequence. The Verge’s example involved bringing a cat photo to life, although its tongue grew amusingly and unrealistically large during the animation.

Introduce something more complicated, however, and the results can become strange. A vintage car might start spinning in an impossible way. A picture of food could suddenly include a ghostly hand reaching into the frame, which is quite unsettling.

Apparently, one attempt with a famous Van Gogh self-portrait resulted in a pigeon flying out of his eye. These peculiar outputs demonstrate the AI is interpreting and adding motion, but it doesn’t always grasp context, physics, or common sense. This highlights ongoing challenges in visual effects AI.

The example of a women’s soccer game photo turning into chaos with extra players and referees appearing shows another difficulty. AI often struggles with accurately counting objects or maintaining logical scene composition when generating complex scenarios from a single image. It recognizes “soccer game” and adds related elements, but not always coherently.

Conclusion

The arrival of a consumer-facing Google AI video generator, even in this initial, somewhat limited form via the Honor partnership, marks a notable moment. It transitions powerful AI capabilities from research labs into the hands of everyday users. While the technology clearly needs further refinement, its potential impact on creative expression, communication, and productivity is substantial.

Observing how this field develops will be fascinating. We’ll see how users adopt these generative video tools, how developers enhance them based on feedback and technological progress, and how society adapts to the increasing presence of synthetic media. The journey for the Google AI video generator and similar technologies is just starting, promising to reshape our interaction with visual content and digital content creation.